Archive for 10 April 2007
Organizational Innovation
| Nicolai Foss |
Organizational economists, new institutional economics, contract theorists, etc. are taken up with assessing alternative feasible allocations of decision and income rights, contracts, governance structures and institutions in terms of their impact on value creation for a relevant social system, whether a dyad, a multi-person firm, an industry, or a whole economy.
However, they usually assume that the set of alternatives is given to the choosing agent or set of agents. For example, in the Grossman/Hart/Moore property rights view, agents may not entirely understand the sources of payoffs, but they know exactly how alternative allocations of property rights impact payoffs. Of course, this is entirely in line with what we — given Peter’s post on Lionel Robbins below — may call “Robbinsian maximizing” in which the discovery and/or creation of new alternatives is deliberately disregarded. (more…)
Classic Books in Business and Economic History
| Peter Klein |
EH.Net’s Project 2000/2001 features new reviews of classic works in business and economic history. Here are some that may be of particular interest to O&M readers:
- David Landes on Chandler’s The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business
- Thomas McCraw on Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy
- Stanley Engerman on Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
- Cynthia Taft Morris on Davis and North’s Institutional Change and American Economic Growth
- Paul Hohenberg on Landes’s The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present
- Winifred Rothenberg on Horwitz’s The Transformation of American Law
- Albert Fishlow on Gerschenkron’s Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective
- Philip Coelho on North and Thomas’s The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History
Citation Metrics Using Google Scholar
| Nicolai Foss |
Are you in the process of preparing for tenure, promotion or for applying for a new job? Do you, as is increasingly the norm, wish to include your citatation data? Are you concerned that some or perhaps many of the journals in which your work is cited are not ISI listed?
Then you may benefit from checking out Anne-Wil Harzing’s new software for analyzing Google Scholar citation data, Publish or Perish.
It produces a number of useful statistics, such as, obviously, total number of papers and citations, average citations, etc., but also, and less trivially, the important metrics for measuring an academic’s impact, such as Hirsch’s h-index (and its updated version that gives more weight to more recent papers).
Lionel Robbins at 75
| Peter Klein |
This year’s Austrian Scholars Conference featured a panel on the 75th anniversary of Lionel Robbins’s influential Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science. (Both the first and second editions of the book are available online at mises.org.) Robbins’s definition of economics as “the science which studies human behavior as a relationship between scarce means which have alternative uses” is sometimes considered so pedestrian, so completely subsumed into the mainstream of economic theory, that the book itself gets little attention today. However, as explained by the panelists at the Robbins session mentioned above, the book’s argument is sophisticated and nuanced, and definitely still worth reading.
The LSE, Robbins’s professional home, is hosting a conference on the book in December 2007, sponsored by the LSE and the journal Economica. “The purpose of this conference is both to renew the considerations of Robbins’s theme and reflect on the current nature and significance of economic science as well as examine Robbins’s own position from a historical perspective.” Details below the fold (courtesy of SSRN).
NB: Israel Kirzner’s first book, The Economic Point of View (1960), about the history of the definition of economics, is also now available online. (more…)
Organizations and Markets 
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